virtualization.info

Last week VMware finally released the much awaited View 4.0, which supports vSphere 4.0 and introduces the software-only version of the Teradici remote desktop protocol PCoIP.

VMware is offering two versions of View 4: Enterprise (which includes vSphere and View Manager 4.0), priced at $150 per concurrent user, and Premier (which also includes View Composer and ThinApp), priced at $250 per concurrent user.

Of course the key aspect of this release is how well PCoIP performs on LAN and WAN scenarios.
Unfortunately the product will be available for download on November 19, so for now it’s impossible to make a performance analysis and comparison with Microsoft RDP 7, Citrix ICA/HDX and the other tens of  alternatives that are flooding the VDI market.

The major problem with PCoIP is if its performance is so great to justify the adoption of a new proprietary remote desktop protocol at its 1.0 release (the protocol is more mature than that but so far relied on hardware components).
Many customers may want to be careful here, mostly considering that VMware and Teradici just have a co-development agreement, which is not even exclusive.
What happens if Teradici is acquired by a VMware competitor or if the company suffers major issues?
And most of all, what happens if one year from now VMware consider this protocol unpractical and too expensive to optimize and decides to replace it, for instance, with the just ratified Net2Display standard? 

Anyway a lot has been already said.

Brian Madden already published a brief FAQ list, which includes a couple of interesting details:

• The PCoIP client only supports Windows at the moment. Linux and Mac OS versions are expected next year
• View 4.0 will fully support Microsoft Windows 7 as guest OS in early 2010

Chad Sakac already published a blueprint to design a View 4.0 architecture with the recently announced VMware/Cisco/EMC hardware called VBlock.
The solution (a VBlock 1) fits over 2,048 virtual desktops and costs $750 per seat all inclusive:

The paper includes some performance analysis. It doesn’t clarify if the numbers are obtained when using the RDP or the PCoIP protocol (assuming this will make any difference) but it’s really worth a check.

Labels: Releases, VDI, VMware

In June the new startup Liquidware Labs released the first rebranded version of the VMsight technology acquired in May: Stratusphere 4.2.
They are back this week with the first consistent update and easy to guess the new 4.5 version integrates the technology acquired from Entrigue Systems in September: ProfileUnity.

In details Stratusphere 4.5 introduces support for Citrix XenDesktop 4 and Microsoft Window 7, as well as the preliminary support for VMware View 4 (which still is in private beta).
On top of that the product sports several enhancements in the GUI, in the reports and in the correlation engine.

Anyway the most interesting thing of this release is that now Liquidware Labs allows users to download a trial version of the product.
The company always said that it’s specifically targeting Professional Services Organizations (PSOs), and most of the time this means that you don’t need to have (and promote) a freely downloadable trial.
If Liquidware Labs has just changed this it may mean that it’s also changing its marketing strategy.

Labels: LiquidWare Labs, Releases, VDI

A couple of weeks ago Citrix announced the newest version of its XenDesktop. While the product is about to deliver interesting features, many customers complained about the new licensing scheme because Citrix moved a concurrent user model to a named user model.

The product is not out yet (the release is planned for November 16) but Citrix, listening to the feedbacks, already changed its pricing strategy.

With an informal announcement on his corporate blog, Sumit Dhawan, Vice President of Product Marketing, describes the new rules:

1. Customers can choose between the “per named user” model and the “per device” model for XenDesktop Enterprise ($225) and Platinum Editions ($350).
   Same license for both uses. Same price.
2. The Standard Edition license is replaced by a brand new VDI Edition which has a “per named user” and “per device” license model ($95) as well as the dear old “per concurrent user” license model ($195).

The new VDI edition doesn’t include XenApp but still supports 3rd party hypervisors like Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware VI/vSphere.

Labels: Citrix, VDI

Just in case you don’t fill overwhelmed by dozen of proprietary remote desktop protocols and RDP enhancements, here’s a new one: Ericom Blaze.

The company launched it last month, claiming impressive performance:

• RDP compression up to 98%
• graphics-rich content 10-25 times faster than RDP
• RDP bandwidth consumption by up to 25 times

Clearly Blaze is not a new protocol but rather an RDP enhancement that can compete against the Quest/Provision Networks Experience Optimization Pack (EOP).

Blaze works with Windows XP, Vista and 7 virtual desktops. Support for Linux and Mac OS X VMs should arrive within the end of this month. Anyway its use is not limited to VDI scenarios.
Interestingly, Ericom clarifies that it requires a CPU with support for the MMX instruction set.

Right now Blaze supports the Ericom PowerTerm connection brokers and VMware View (Linux client only, Windows client support is expected later during this Q4).

Labels: Ericom, VDI

By now every virtualization.info reader knows that VMware and Citrix are completely focused on competing in the VDI space rather than on “simple” server consolidation.
For now most of the discussion is mostly around their connection brokers (and their remote desktop protocols), but in a matter of months it will be extended to their application virtualizations solutions and their upcoming client hypervisors.

Now, a question: What is one of the most viewed threads on the VMware VMTN forums dedicated to the connection broker View?

Answer: A thread titled “What made you chose VMware View or Citrix XenDesktop”, which was started at the end of April and so far collected almost 3,000 views.

The thread is full of interesting comments. Of course it’s impossible to say if all of them come from real customers. For sure many come from well-known VMware users.
Also, not every comment, even the genuine ones, reports correct information. Nonetheless the sum of them contributes to clarify the customers sentiment about both products, and most of all about VDI as a technology.

Some of the things they said so far are well worth a mention here and should be considered along with the architectural reference blueprints that both VMware and Citrix released so far (our emphasis):

…I have found View very easy to install, configure and manage, from bare metal to delivery of 4 nodes less than a day. you have two consoles, vCenter and View Administrator.

Now compare this to XD the same 4 node deployment was over a week of shoehorning etc, bear in mind this is on Tier one hardware. Also to get similar functionality you will be presented with I think 6 different management consoles. you also have the added benefit of Offline Desktops (albeit experimental) with view that is not available with XD.

True ICA is a better remote protocol that RDP, but form my opinion the pain points are too great for the product…

…Finally as for price, again, I can only tell you what we've gotten back and XD has come in more expensive than View and that includes purchasing Splitview as well.

…There is a learning curve for most who enter the Citrix world. There is a bit more complexity in the configuration as some has stated, but we are reaping the benefits…

…Basically the biggest reason is that most companies are a VMware shop. So it makes sense to only have to call one vendor for end to end support.

Also cost. View costs less per desktop compared to XenDesktop i.e licensing, more VM's per physical host, linked clones for storage savings etc. TCO is very important because desktop costs are already very low.

Stability. View has less components and VMware historically does great QA on the products that they release. Microsoft and Citrix, not so well.

Big reason, VMware views linked clone technology. SAN storage is not cheap, PC hard drives are. You need to be able to sell this to senior management. When you tell them the hard drive storage is going to be 4 times as much they will laugh at you…

…To be honest, we chose VMware for the cost. Presently we are having a few issues that have made us reconsider our choice.

One issue you need to closely look at is in regards to using remote virtual desktops, if that is your intended use, and the interaction with the OS of the clients who will be connecting in. Page 18 of the View Manager Administration guide is a must see if you want to use remote clients through the view portal. Information I wish I had during our evaluation…

…One of my vendors was giving me a lot of pressure to validate XD for my environment. I am PoCing View 3.1 right now. I'm not looking at XD for the following reasons:

1) I'm a VMware shop 1 throat to strangle.

2) Just because XD works with ESX backends now doesn't mean they will in the future…

…To be honest, the only advantage that Citrix has right now is their ICA display protocol. This is the only reason that Citrix is even being evaluated at most companies…

(please note anyway that all the comments above refer to View 3.x and XenDesktop 3.x and not the upcoming XenDesktop 4)

Citrix felt the need to address some of the points emphasized above, and published an article that covers the installation and management complexity, the RAM consumption, and the price.
This one is worth a read too.

Labels: Citrix, VDI, VMware

Just before the launch of XenDesktop 4.0, Citrix released a 42-pages reference architecture on how to build a VDI environment for 10,000 seats with the following characteristics:

The blueprint specifically applies to the previous version of XenDesktop and discusses the following areas of the project:

• Virtualization Infrastructure: A detailed design on the underlying virtualization infrastructure focusing on hardware, capacity, high-availability and storage.
• Operating System Delivery: A detailed design on the delivery of the base operating system to hosted and streamed desktops with a focus on farm design, capacity, cache and high-availability.
• Application Delivery: Focuses on the integration of the application layer in regards to desktop delivery, specifically applications, integration and application optimization.
• Desktop Delivery: Creates a design for the desktop delivery process, with a focus on capacity, groups and group settings.
• Virtual Desktop: Focuses on defining the components of a desktop image for hosted and streamed desktops. The section looks at virtual desktop specifications, desktop images and storage requirements.
• Access Design: Focuses on how internal and external users receive their resources.
• Business Continuity Design: Focuses on designing a solution that reduces the impact of service faults on users.

Independently on the decision to adopt Citrix technologies, it’s a good starting point that anybody interested in VDI may want to check.

In the past VMware published similar papers, like Virtual Desktop Infrastructure - Deployment Considerations and VDI Implementation Best Practices.

Labels: Citrix, Papers, VDI

Yesterday Citrix announced the forthcoming release of XenDesktop 4.0, which will be available November 16.

The Citrix answer to the upcoming VMware View 4.0 (and its software version of Teradici PCoIP protocol) is more aggressive than ever.

First of all, the XenDesktop 4.0 Enterprise and Platinum editions are going to include a full, unrestricted edition of XenApp.
The new strategy at Citrix, called FlexCast, is to make no distinction between a desktop deployed on a virtual machine (what we call today VDI), one on a bare metal machine, or one served by a terminal services farm.
XenDesktop plus XenApp are going to allow remote access to all these desktops or to some of their applications, along with application and OS streaming where applicable.

It wouldn’t be too surprising if, over time, Citrix would decide to completely fade out XenApp as a stand-alone technology and name, to focus just on the XenDesktop brand.

The second thing is that the new HDX adaptive technology (which includes the ICA protocol) has been further improved and includes the following components:

• HDX MediaStream for Flash
  Accelerates multimedia performance sending Flash content in its native compressed format to the user’s device and leveraging the local processing power for playback to provide truly local PC-like performance.
• HDX RealTime
  Enhances real-time communications by enabling support for webcams and improving voice and music audio quality while still consuming minimal bandwidth.
• HDX Plug-n-Play
  Enhances support for specialized keyboards (such as the Bloomberg keyboard) and dictation devices like the Philips Speechmike; Also provides users with flexibility to customize their multi-monitor configurations with special screen arrangements (such as U, L, T, reverse L and inverse T shapes) and different sizes, resolutions and orientations.
• HDX 3D
  Extends desktop virtualization to advanced users of CAD/CAM and engineering applications, even over WAN connections. HDX 3D enables organizations to source talent on a global basis, rapidly provision those workers with high powered desktops and professional 3D applications, yet maintain centralized control over intellectual property.
• HDX IntelliCache
  Optimizes performance and network utilization for multiple users by caching bandwidth intensive data and graphics throughout the infrastructure and transparently delivering them as needed from the most efficient location.

Citrix also changed the licensing model of XenDesktop, moving from a concurrent user model to a named user model, as Brian Madden details in his coverage.
Chris Wolf, Senior Analyst at Burton Group, has additional insights about this topic that are really worth a check.

Last but not least, XenDesktop 4.0 ships with both XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V (and continues to support VMware ESX).
Which is like saying that to Citrix it’s completely irrelevant now which hypervisor you use. They just want the premium profit coming from the renewed global effort to centralize the employees workstations.

And to be absolutely sure that XenDesktop arrives in the enterprise customers’ hands, XenDesktop 4.0 is going to be available free of charge to the ones that subscribed the software assurance. Even if it now packs more features than previous versions.
All the others, with a special focus on the XenApp customers which represent the core business of Citrix, the company is offering a remarkable trade-up program to convert them into XenDesktop customers.

Update: The XenDesktop 4.0 licensing change (and its pricing policy) didn’t encounter the favor of customers and prospects.
Citrix reacted quickly to try to recover the positive mood around the product features, and promised to “actively investigating appropriate licensing programs for XenDesktop 4 to address [the use cases where the per-named-user licensing doesn’t work]”.

Citrix has four big challenges:

• How move its core audience from presentation virtualization (XenApp) to hardware virtualization+application virtualization+presentation virtualization (XenDesktop)
• How to attract a new class of customers, that are more interested in hardware virtualization than presentation virtualization
• How to build a brand awareness (which implies trust) that can rival with VMware in the hardware virtualization market VMware leads
• How to justify the jump to and create confidence in desktop virtualization

As Brian Madden already said in his article, the reactions that this licensing change provoked don’t seem to help Citrix in solving any of the four above.

Labels: Citrix, VDI

In February VMware launched an open source version of its View client, released under the LGPL 2.1 version.

virtualization.info already wrote that with this move the company could conquer a large number of thin client providers, which may prefer to adopt and customize View Open Client rather than developing their own connectors.
But it is also possible that VMware may have decided to go open source primarily to accelerate the development of the product and reduce any real or perceived gap with the competition (read Citrix).

In any case, now that View 4.0 is in private beta and finally introduces the much awaited software version of PCoIP, VMware has all the interest to ask the help of the open source community and attract the attention on the new build.

View Open Client 4.0 beta 1 introduces the support for SSL tunneling, two-factor authentication with RSA SecurID and a Command Line Interface (CLI).

Like for the previous release anyway there’s no support for:

• USB redirection
• Multiple desktop sessions
• Multimedia redirection

This client supports View 3.0, 3.1 and the old Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM) product, versions 2.0 and 2.1.

Labels: VDI, VMware

As virtualization.info reported multiple times, VMware recently decided to appoint a second CTO to focus exclusively on desktop virtualization.
His business unit should include:

• the VDI connection broker View (acquired from Propero in 2007)
• the technologies OEM’ed from ThinPrint in 2007 (for remote printing), Wyse Technology in 2008 (for RDP acceleration) and RTO Software in 2009 (for persona management)
• the application virtualization platform ThinApp (acquired from Thinstall in 2008)
• the upcoming high-performance remote desktop protocol PCoIP (co-developed with Teradici since 2008)
• the upcoming hypervisor for embedded devices Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP, acquired from Trango in 2008)
• the upcoming client hypervisor Client Virtualization Platform (CVP, which will probably include the technologies acquired from Tungsten Graphics in 2008)

The mission to glue together such amazing amount of technologies, coming from completely different companies for culture and development style, is now in the hands of Scott Davis, who spent more than two years at VMware as Chief Data Center Architect and was, before that, the President and CTO at Virtual Iron.

In the last few weeks Brian Madden, and others, questioned the VMware capability to understand and be relevant in the desktop virtualization space.

Davis answers (ah! the beauty of this blog-centric era) on his new corporate blog:

…VMware’s vision for client or desktop computing is to use virtualization technologies to encapsulate and isolate all the aspects of the desktop. Make each aspect independently manageable, duplicate-able, recreate-able.  Employee-Owned IT? Separate into different virtual machines. Lost, broken or obsolete device? Throw it away, the VM is preserved in the data center and can be redeployed at will. 

I want the freedom that comes with complete separation between my physical devices and all my software. I want device independence; my applications, my data, my personality dynamically composited and encapsulated executing on the optimal device(s) for my  current time and location.  That may mean collocating layers on the same device or distributing across multiple systems. I want isolation; my personal and professional applications, run-time and data isolated and encapsulated, accessible via the internet, mobile devices, thin and thick clients. With client virtualization I want the display, the computes and the storage intelligently and automatically placed – sometimes its’ better to execute the workload in the data center and virtualize the graphics to a client. Other times, I want to take the whole workload with me and run it on a laptop. Or something in between. And why stop there? We’re also doing best of breed virtualization for isolation and encapsulation between all relevant boundaries – that’s why we have ThinApp for application virtualization and continue to invest in advancing that technology. And why we announced at VMworld our relationship with RTO to make use of their profile caching and replication technology in our solutions. And why we partner with Teradici to jointly bring solutions to market based on the best in class remote graphics protocol designed explicitly for virtualized desktops.  And there’s a lot more coming!…

The VMware marketing now calls this User-Centric Computing.

How to get there? First of all by easing the pain of enterprises that have to upgrade to Microsoft Windows 7:

And with the Windows 7 refresh looming, this is the ideal time to make the break to virtualized clients. Rapid provisioning, desktop style. Replacing obsolete or lost devices. Painlessly. Upgrading any individual component part, be it hardware or software, without down time or outage. Reduced Complexity. Desktops have gotten burdened with greater and greater complexity, as anyone trying to figure out why their Windows system runs slower and slower will attest. Hey, I’ve built operating systems software and even I get stuck!

Are you satisfied Brian?

Labels: VDI, VMware

Last week VMware released a bunch of updates for several products in its portfolio. Each build is primarily for bug fixing but View Manager 3.1.2 also introduces a new feature:

Labels: Disaster Recovery, Lifecycle Management, Releases, VDI, VMware

Just a couple of days ago virtualization.info wrote about the upcoming launch of Smart Business Desktop, the IBM Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) cloud computing infrastructure powered by VMware, Citrix, Wyse Technology and Desktone products.

We can’t wait October to try what IBM claimed to be an industry first, even if we just spotted a company that seems to have a DaaS offering well before the Big Blue: tuCloud.

The startup promises to deliver on-demand Windows Vista or Windows 7 (with Aero) hosted desktops with up to 4GB RAM within 24 hours maximum (so it’s not in real-time through a self-service provisioning portal as we expect the IBM DaaS to work).

tuCloud offers pay-per-use and pre-pay pricing models, starting at $120 (or 100 Euros) for the first desktop (1GB RAM) plus $65 (or 50 Euros) for additional ones.
A customer can ask up to 100 virtual desktops and, paying an extra, it can have its environment preconfigured with popular commercial products.

There’s even an option to have offshore virtual desktops, where the customers access the cloud through a SSL channel, save everything in a ciphered online storage, surf the web through a transparent proxy, don’t live any trace in the system logs, and have their IP scrubbed from outbound communications.
Of course tuClouds accepts anonymous payments for this service and, granted, they are going to have a lot of problems with it.

The company website doesn’t reveal which virtualization platform serves the virtual desktops states that it supports Microsoft RDP and that power users can have PCoIP, the protocol that Teradici is co-developing with VMware.
Now, because the software-only version of PCoIP is not ready yet, it’s easy to guess that tuCloud is only supporting PCoIP if the customer can have the proper hardware on its client.
A closer look at the footnotes in fact seems to imply that Windows 7 virtual desktops with Aero are only possible when connecting with PCoIP.

tuCloud supports thin clients from Cranberry, HP, Thinspace and Wyse Technology. It seems that the company can deliver any of these at the customers site.

Who’s behind tuCloud?
The company, which seems to be based in UK, is managed by the CEO Guise Bule.
The Bule’s profile on LinkedIn reveals that tuCloud exists at least since January 2006, even if the website was registered only in February 2008.
No other information seem available about the company or the management team.

How tuCloud can offer this DaaS service?
Exactly like for IBM and anyone else will ever provide a DaaS offering, the first question is: how the company is dealing with the licensing issues of the guest operating systems and the applications installed inside the virtual desktops?

Microsoft has a special license for this called Virtual Enterprise Centralized Desktops (VECD) which allows Software Assurance (SA) and non-SA customers to remotely access a Windows client operating system deployed on a VDI environment.
The problem is that this license is per-device and it’s a yearly subscription. So if a DaaS customer accessed his virtual desktop from his device only for 1 month, the cloud provider still has to pay the entire year subscription for him. It cannot simply transfer the remaining 11 months on another customer because the device is different.

And what about the other ISVs licensing terms that should be considered when DaaS customers install, for example, Adobe PhotoShop?

It is very hard to be the first. We’ll see the company will address the questions.

Labels: Teradici, tuCloud, VDI

After a couple of months of beta, Quest released the second minor update for its multi-platform connection broker vWorkspace 6.0.

The new build introduces several enhancements in multi-monitor, USB and graphic support, and a couple of new features:

• the integration with NetApp FlexClone technology (only for VMware VDI environments)
• the integration of vWorkspace Web Access portal with Microsoft SharePoint (experimental)

Labels: Provision Networks, Quest, Releases, VDI

Despite its current size Liquidware Labs, the new company of David Bieneman, founder and former CEO of Vizioncore (acquired by Quest in January 2008), is demonstrating to be extremely aggressive.

The startup acquired VMSight in May, just before its public launch, and then opened a community portal at VDI.com (which is a notable investment considering the length and the relevance of the domain name) which collected over 1,000 subscribers in just a few weeks.

Now Liquidware Labs proceeds with a second acquisition: Entrigue Systems.

Entrigue is small US company founded in 2000 which offers a product called Script Start.
Script Start is able to create, provision and remotely manage the Windows user profiles (what the industry is now calling persona).
It also does other things like software/hardware inventory, but most of all it supports presentation virtualization environments like Citrix XenApp, VDI environments like VMware View and even enterprise desktop virtualization wrappers like Microsoft MED-V.

Entrigue used to offer an open source version of Script Start which lacks of some enterprise features. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem that Liquidware Labs saved this edition during the acquisition.

This move is extremely interesting. The technology acquired from VMsight puts Liquidware Labs in the area of VDI optimization, not persona management. So why the company needs a product like Script Start?
It is entirely possible that Liquidware Labs is working to build some sort of automation to glue together the two things: the data collected by Stratusphere about the user activity in VDI environments could be analyzed to recognize the root cause of the bottlenecks and, according to that, the user profile could be optimized by ProfileUnity to improve the experience.

If so expect Liquidware Labs to acquire a company in the scripting/automation space soon, or at least announce a new product suite in the coming months.

Labels: Acquisitions, Entrigue Systems, LiquidWare Labs, VDI

Virtual Computer, the company founded by the father of Virtual Iron (acquired by Oracle in May) continues to evolve its management solution NxTop Center heavily using multiple forms of virtualization.

The company already has a Xen-based client hypervisor and a fairly complex web-based console which uses virtual machines,  snapshots and clones to publish the right system environment to the right user with the right customization (what the industry is calling persona now).

Now Virtual Computer also simplified the management of the application layer thanks to a technology partnership with XenoCode, the application virtualization company that already has an OEM deal with Novell.

Compared to the Novell agreement, Virtual Computer is not OEM’ing the XenoCode Virtual Application Studio.
It is just supporting the applications virtualized with the XenoCode technology out-of-the-box inside its NxTop virtual machines.

It is not a revolution but this way Virtual Computer is silently building an end-to-end VDI stack that one day could rival with the upcoming ones from Citrix and VMware.

Labels: Alliances, Platform Management, VDI, Virtual Computer, XenoCode

In mid-July virtualization.info unveiled that VMware was looking for a second CTO, who could take care of a desktop virtualization business unit that includes View, ThinApp, the Client Virtualization Platform (CVP), the new Virtual Profiles product OEM’ed from RTO Software, and more.

To cover this role VMware didn’t hire an external resource but promoted its Chief Data Center Architect, Scott Davis, co-founder and former President and CTO at Virtual Iron (acquired by Oracle in May).

Davis is in VMware since April 2007, but VMware formally presented him as CTO only at VMworld 2009.
This move should unload the growing responsibility of Steve Herrod, who leads the VMware technical effort since December 2001.

Labels: Leadership, VDI, VMware

In our VMworld 2009 live coverage of the Day 2 keynote, we briefly mentioned that VMware has now an OEM agreement with RTO Software to use their Virtual Profiles products inside View.

The OEM agreement allows RTO Software to sell Virtual Profiles independently and update the product’s code base.
The interesting part anyway is that RTO Software has a similar deal with another major vendor that is become increasingly active in the desktop virtualization space, Symantec, even if their version of Virtual Profiles is not out yet.

Virtual Profiles is a mandatory piece to manage the so-called persona (the user data and customization of the applications and the system environment) in a virtual desktop infrastructure.
This agreement will help VMware to better compete against Citrix, Symantec and the other vendors that are developing end-to-end VDI solutions.

On top of that the persona management is a building block of the VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP) effort as much as the mobile hypervisor acquired from Trango in November 2008.

Labels: Alliances, RTO Software, VDI, VMware

More than one year ago IBM signed a partnership with the startup Desktone to implement a 1,400 seats VDI architecture powered by their technology at the Pike County Schools.

That move cleared the IBM plan to become a Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) cloud provider which became a reality at the end of last month.

Two weeks ago in fact IBM announced the upcoming availability of its new Smart Business Desktop, a IaaS architecture powered by VMware, Citrix, Desktone and Wyse products.

The company website doesn’t clarify which vendors will provide which components but it’s pretty easy to guess (Citrix helped with a specific announcement): VMware will provide the hypervisor (ESX) and management layer (vCenter), Citrix will provide the connection broker (XenDesktop) and remote desktop protocol (HDX), Wyse will provide the thin clients and Desktone of course will glue the whole thing with its self-service portal for customers and policy manager for the cloud provider.

IBM plans to launch the Smart Business Desktop offering in October 2009 with a subscription model.

For the very first time a hardware virtualization architecture will be an alternative to the web-based architectures that Google represents so well. Hopefully virtualization.info will be able to access the IBM cloud and report about it after some extended use.

Labels: Citrix, Desktone, IBM, VDI, VMware, Wyse Technology

The VMworld 2009 conference ended yesterday, an amazing experience as usual.
virtualization.info already covered the two opening keynotes (day 1 and day 2) plus a special closed-doors keynote about cloud computing.
Like every year will publish a long wrap-up with the impressions about the show in one week or so.

Before leaving San Francisco anyway, in a pure Steve Jobs style, there’s one more thing.

During a small press briefing at VMworld the company CTO Steve Herrod answered questions about several aspects of the company strategy including a brand new one about when the company plans to release its client hypervisor.

Herrod said that the VMware Client Virtualization Platform (CVP) won’t be released before H1 2010.
He didn’t add anything to this but the impression was more about a launch in Q2. And anyway he didn’t clarify if that was the date for the beta or the GA code.

So, unless VMware is trying to surprise its competitors, this means that Citrix will arrive earlier with its free XenClient, which is expected for GA at the end of this year.

The client hypervisor is a critical piece in any next generation virtual desktop infrastructures.
Along with View 4.0 and the software version of the Teradici PCoIP protocol, CVP is a key building block of the VMware VDI 2.0 platform.
Any mistake in the execution will inevitably compromise the confidence in VDI, postponing a broader adoption. VMware is investing a lot in its VDI strategy and may want to be extra careful about CVP.
This may be the reason why the company preferred to not show too much about it during this VMworld.

Labels: VDI, VMware

Leostream just released a new version of its Connection Broker.

In version 6.0 the company introduced the full support for Citrix XenServer. With this new 6.2, Leostream completely focus on Microsoft technologies.

Connection Broker 6.2 in fact fully supports Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 as backend hypervisors, plus Windows 7 as virtual desktop guest OS and RDP 7.0 as remote protocol.

On top of that the new version of this product adds a number of interesting new features:

• Multi-monitor support
• USB management
  USB pass-through policies allow administrators to manage classes of devices or individual devices, depending on need. USB policies can be combined with other Leostream policies, such as location-based ones, to support the exact implementation of business rules
• Location-based printing
  Administrators can specify a list of network printers to connect to a particular group of clients based on their location. End-users can select local printers when connected to remote desktops
• Single Sign On for RDP
  Provides seamless access to all versions of Windows virtual desktops from any client device, including Windows 2000, 2003, XP, Vista, and RDP 7
• User profile support

Labels: Leostream, Releases, VDI

Exactly two years ago Citrix announced the acquisition of XenSource, officially entering the server virtualization (with XenServer) and desktop virtualization (with XenDesktop) markets, in direct competition with the former partner VMware.

Citrix invested $500 million in this operation but spent the minimum possible effort to spread the word about its existence in the hardware virtualization universe.
Of course the relevance of XenSource in the open source world, the implications on the Xen project and the price paid for the startup, engaged the community for a while, but beyond that the company did almost nothing to change its image of terminal services / application delivery company into something different, that could attract a large number of competitors’ customers.

It is safe to say that for the first 18 months after the acquisition, the Citrix marketing didn’t take any major step in reposition the company as a real player in a market that was completely new before the arrival of XenSource folks.
So it doesn’t surprise much that most customers didn’t perceive (and still do not) XenServer as a serious alternative to VMware ESX.

Still now, the only major tool that the company uses to evangelize XenServer and its efforts in the server and desktop virtualization space is the voice of the well-known Simon Crosby, founder and former CTO of XenSource and now CTO of the Virtualization & Management division at Citrix.
But his voice is just a whisper compared to the massive marketing effort that VMware puts in place every quarter and the tireless activity of its ubiquitous community.
Without the Virtual Reality Check benchmarks (Feb 09) and Burton Group's report on XenServer maturity (July 09), life would be even too easy for competitors.

Something is changing anyway.
Citrix probably decided that competing on the server virtualization market with VMware is a useless waste of energy as the hypervisor may become a commodity that customers prefer to find inside their operating systems, and so gave away XenServer for free. And it’s getting aggressive on the desktop virtualization space.

For the first time since the acquisition Citrix openly and directly address competition against VMware, and does that very aggressively.
On the corporate website a comparison matrix titled Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View: Which Is the Best VDI Solution? is a public declaration of war:

On the blogs and webinar, Citrix even calls allies like NetApp (which is the biggest competitor of the VMware parent company EMC) when talking about Storage Best Practices for High Definition VDI and says:

FAQ:  What differentiates the Citrix + Netapp VDI solution from the one from VMware?
Answer: As outlined in the detailed competitive comparison on our website,  the Citrix + Netapp VDI solution differs from the one from VMware in four key areas: 
1.       User Experience:  Citrix's HDX Technologies optimizes the user experience by leveraging integrated client/endpoint-, server-, or network side technologies to allow users an optimal high definition user experience to a broad range of applications - streaming media, Flash, audio, 3D graphics, etc - over both the Local Area Network and the Wide Area Network.  This is in stark contrast to VMware View, which will work for LAN use cases, but not for the WAN.
2.       Application Management:  The Citrix + Netapp VDI solution includes integrated XenApp, Citrix's proven application virtualization solution, which works with 1000's of Windows applications, in either a Hosted or Streamed mode.  VMware View integrates with VMware's ThinApp application virtualization technology.  However,  the VMware View solution requires bundling all delivered applications into the VM, which makes application delivery much more cumbersome and difficult to manage.
3.       Flexibility:  The Citrix + Netapp VDI solution offers IT organizations the flexibility to use a variety of VM Infrastructure - Microsoft's Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, or VMware ESX.  By contrast, VMware View ties an IT organization to only VMware ESX.  This gives the customers the flexibility to choose the most powerful cost-effective best-of-breed VDI solution.
4.       Policy-based access control:  The Citrix + Netapp VDI solution leverages a familiar Microsoft and/or Citrix management user interface for managing granular -  by user groups or individuals - access to data and applications.

The point is not if the statements above are true or not (plenty of virtualization.info readers will rush to clarify this, for sure). The point is that Citrix may have finally decided what to do with XenSource technologies and it’s moving to execute the plan.
If true customers now at least have a more concrete understanding of the strategy to make their decision.

Labels: Citrix, VDI, VMware

After Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 4.0, VMware launched yesterday another private beta, this time for its VDI solution View.

The new View 4.0 finally introduces the software-only implementation of the Teradici PC over IP (PCoIP) remoting protocol.

VMware is working on a way to replace Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) since late 2007, when it joined the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) to work on a new standard called Net2Display that never came out.

Once clear that Net2Display couldn’t replace RDP anytime soon, VMware developed a two-phases plan to deliver a more efficient protocol for its VDI platform.
In phase one, the company signed an OEM agreement with the thin client vendor WYSE Technology, to use its TCX-MMR (for multimedia) and TCX-MDS (for multi-display) technologies.
In phase two, VMware started a co-development program with Teradici, to create a software-only version of its high-performance PCoIP protocol.

At the moment the Teradici technology only works with the help of dedicated graphic adapters that must be installed on the machine serving the virtual desktops.
VMware demonstrated this technology in action during the VMworld Europe 2009 and had positive feedbacks.

After months of work it seems that the two companies have something ready to show because this first private beta of View 4.0 is completely dedicated to PCoIP.
Subsequent beta builds will focus more on the connection broker itself and may be open to a wider audience.

It’s safe to assume that VMware will demonstrate this software-only implementation at the upcoming VMworld 2009 in San Francisco.
We’ll see if what the two companies are building is fast enough to replace RDP (which is becoming more VDI-focused thanks to the Calista technologies that Microsoft acquired in January 2008).

Labels: Teradici, VDI, VMware

During his last earnings call the VMware CEO Paul Maritz didn’t just announce a 38% drop in profits and the hiring of several new executives, but also the company forecast for the VDI adoption.

It’s not a secret that VMware is pushing hard on VDI since April 2007, when it acquired the startup Propero and decided to compete against its former best partner Citrix and all the rest of the ecosystem that itself created in 2006.

So it’s surprising to hear Maritz saying that a serious adoption of VDI won’t happen before another one or two years.

The question was submitted by a Citi analyst during the earnings call, who asked to separate the hype from the reality. Maritz answered:

…That’s going to take a while for them to get comfortable to really understand all the issues involved and actually get into production so we view this as incredibly important with tremendous amount of potential but it’s really going to be into 2010 and 2011 I think before we start to show a significant impact in terms of large amounts of revenue…

The comment is even more surprising when we compare the results that VMware and Citrix announced in the desktop virtualization space.
Maritz said that his company secured two new Enterprise License Agreements (ELAs) in Q2 2009, while the Citrix CEO Mark Templeton reported 200 new customers for the same timeframe, and 10 of them booked over 1000 virtual desktops.

It more than clear that VDI is not ready for a mainstream adoption, but this lack of confidence from VMware is something pretty new.
Maybe this is why the company is actively looking for a new CTO that can lead the desktop virtualization strategy.

Labels: Citrix, VDI, VMware

In December 2008 Virtual Bridges closed a major deal with IBM to bundle a Linux-friendly version of its Win4VDI connection broker (called VERDE) with Canonical Ubuntu Linux and the IBM Open Collaboration Client Solution (OCCS), which includes Lotus Symphony, Notes and other IBM products.

The deal was especially relevant because this bundle was designed to deliver a VDI solution based on the KVM virtualization platform that Ubuntu embeds. And IBM was the first major ISV to support its enterprise products inside KVM virtual machines.

Eight months later Virtual Bridges, IBM and Canonical are back with VERDE 2.0.

The first new thing in this release is the product strategy: Virtual Bridges completely replaces Win4VDI with VERDE, avoiding to market and sell two different versions of the same connection broker.

The second and most important news is related to a new key component of the package: a client-side virtualization platform.

The press announcement mentions the term client hypervisor, but in this case we are talking about a lightweight Linux distribution with KVM (which is not a hypervisor architecture).
Like over client hypervisors, this one requires Intel VT enabled so it won’t work on some laptops (courtesy of Sony and Intel).

The virtual desktop can be checked out and copied on the local KVM platform, allowing the mobile user to work in a so-called offline VDI mode.
At that point VERDE 2.0 uses a new Self-Managing Auto Replicating Technology (SMART) protocol to synchronize the local virtual desktop image with the primary one that resides inside the corporate virtual infrastructure.

Labels: IBM, KVM, Releases, VDI, Virtual Bridges

Richard Garsthagen, the popular VMware Senior Evangelist behind the organization of VMworld Europe, released a new free tool called vAudit.

This tool allows to track a VMware View 3.x environment is being used by the users, auditing their activity on the virtual desktops (logon and logon failures, working hours, logoff and disconnection) and showing it on a timeline.

vAudit is not an official VMware product but if extremely popular the company may decide to include its capabilities in the next version of View.

Meanwhile you can enjoy this free version and download it here.

Labels: Releases, VDI, VMware

After launching its own remoting protocol and securing a grand total of $18 million in funding, the startup Pano Logic releases an update for its VDI platform Pano System.

The new version 2.7 introduces support for VMware vSphere 4.0, some performance enhancements and a couple of new features:

• Policy-based installs and updates
  This allows to perform group policy installs and updates of the Pano Direct Service seamlessly and automatically, and allowing for Pano Manager to also be updated from within the administrator interface
• Remote user logoff and disconnect commands
  This enables the administrators to use the Pano Manager interface to logoff and disconnect users accessing their desktop virtual machines (DVMs) via Pano Devices for one-console management

Labels: Pano Logic, Releases, VDI

Just a few weeks after the launch of Connection Broker 6.0, Leostream is back with the first minor update.

Connection Broker 6.1 introduces enhancements to its policy management and reporting layers, plus the following new features:

• Web Access to Citrix XenApp
  End-users can launch Citrix XenApp desktops and applications via the Connection Broker web browser.
• Wake-on-LAN for Physical Machines
  Connection Broker can interact with Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) power up physical machines through Wake-on-LAN.

Labels: Leostream, Releases, VDI

Just yesterday virtualization.info reported how Citrix is reorganizing its application virtualization division by appointing a new CTO.

VMware is doing exactly the same: virtualization.info has learned from trusted sources that the company is looking for a new CTO just for the desktop division, to take care of View, ThinApp, the new remote desktop in co-development with Teradici, and probably the client hypervisor as well.
This new CTO won’t replace the well-known Steve Herrod but rather work side by side with him to lead the VDI and application virtualization effort.

By a coincidence, this morning TechCrunch reports that Mark Lucovsky, Director of Engineering at Google, left the search engine to take a job at VMware.

Lucovsky spent five years at Google. Before that he was a distinguished engineer at Microsoft, where he wrote most of the kernel executive, kernel32, and the Windows API for Windows NT.

Lucovsky spent 16 years in Microsoft and the new VMware CEO, Paul Maritz should know him pretty well (Maritz was one of the top executives at Microsoft from 1986 to 2000).
It’s not confirmed if Lucovsky is going to become the new VMware CTO for the desktop division but if there’s one that knows how to improve an application virtualization platform for Windows he’s the one.

Labels: Leadership, VDI, VMware

Just last month virtualization.info highlighted how Microsoft may be working under the radar to to hit VMware where the vendor is betting the most: on the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) initiative.

Part of this silent effort involves the improvement of the RDP protocol to efficiently handle the heavy multimedia protocols that every VDI client has to render.

Anyway this is just one piece of the VDI story that Microsoft may be shaping.
Another one is the so called client hypervisor, needed to break free the mobile VDI clients from the corporate network dependency. 
On this front Microsoft is deadly silent but it’s evident that the company could push the button at any moment: nobody in the market has the capability to distribute a client hypervisor on million devices like Microsoft.
They could write a dedicated version of Hyper-V and embed it in Windows 7 (or its successor), or just wait for Citrix and Intel to do the dirty work, and then use their upcoming XenClient (which will be free of charge) with an OEM license.

A third key aspect where Microsoft may want to change things to smash VMware is the VDI pricing, which is much higher than any terminal server farm because of the additional component that it requires.
About this very point Microsoft announced yesterday the availability of two new volume licenses for VDI: the Microsoft Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Standard Suite and the Microsoft Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Premium Suite.

Both new offerings include licenses for all the components used in a VDI architecture: the hypervisor (Hyper-V), the management layer (SCVMM, SCCM and SCOM), the remote protocol access license (Remote Desktop Services CALs) and the application virtualization platform (MDOP which includes App-V and MED-V).
On top of these licenses the customer is still required to buy the Virtual Enterprise Centralized Desktop (VECD) and honestly isn’t clear why Microsoft didn’t just package all together.

Like the VECD, these new licenses are per-device and cost $21 per year (Standard Suite) and $53 per year (Premium Suite). They will be available in Q4 2009.
VECD still costs $23 per year (if you are a Software Assurance customer) or $110 per year (if you are not).
Microsoft says that over a 5-years period this pricing costs 1/3 and 1/2 respectively of the VMware View licensing.

As expected Citrix immediately jumped on the bandwagon and announced the XenDesktop support for these new licenses.

Labels: Microsoft, VDI

Last week Wyse Technology announced the release of Virtual Desktop Accelerator (VDA).

This new protocol enhancement, probably a superset of the existing TCX Multimedia technology that VMware is OEM’ing, is promised to accelerate up to 3 times the performance of Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp (using the ICA protocol), VMware View and Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (both using the RDP protocol) in WAN scenarios with more than 200ms in network latency.

Like the Citrix Branch Repeater and other products in this space, VDA works as a proxy that customers need to install on the branch office.

VDA is embedded in Wyse thin clients that use the ThinOS 6.4 but its works also on regular fat clients like workstation and laptops powered by Windows XP.

Here’s a 2 minutes demo of the technology:

Labels: Citrix, Microsoft, VDI, VMware, Wyse Technology

Yesterday Citrix announced a new OEM agreement with Fujitsu Technology Solutions (formerly Fujitsu Siemens) about XenDesktop.

Starting next month, the Citrix connection broker will be part of the Virtual Workplace product, which basically is the end to end VDI architecture that Fujitsu offers to its customers by assembling together several 3rd party technologies, from the physical servers to the application virtualization platform.

The two companies also preannounced an upcoming OEM deal to ship XenServer with the FTS PRIMERGY racks and blade systems.

Labels: Alliances, Citrix, Fujitsu, VDI

Propalms is a US company focused on the server based computing (SBC) market. Like many others in this space, it has the ambition to get a piece of the VDI pie as soon as it will become the new mainstream use of hardware virtualization.

The company joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner Program in April 2007.
In January 2008 it announced for the first time its intention to enter the VDI market in 2008.
It didn’t quite happen: after no less than 8 more months its flagship product, TSE 6.0, was able to act as a connection broker but only with VMware Server.
The company didn’t even bother to include the information in the press announcement.  

Now Propalms is back and announces again its entrance in the VDI market.
This time there will be a dedicated product called Propalms VDI, which is planned some time this year.
Hopefully this time will be for real.

Labels: Propalms, VDI

VMware, Cisco and EMC are really putting a massive effort in promoting the new Unified Computing System (UCS) blade platform that Cisco unveiled in March.

One of the most interesting things produced in this effort is the whitepaper that Cisco just published on his website: Scalability Study for Deploying VMware View on Cisco UCS and EMC V-Max Systems.

The triad managed to setup and document a VDI environment based on VMware Infrastructure 3.5 Update 4 with 640 virtual desktops (Windows XP with 512MB vRAM and 8GB vHD), served by four UCS blades (160 seats per blade), each with 96GB RAM and the new Intel Xeon 5500 Quad Core CPUs.
Which is four times what was achieved on Dell M600 blades.

The description of the environment is extremely detailed and goes deep into the configuration setup and the performance analysis. It’s really worth a read.

Thanks to Virtual Geek for the news.

Labels: Cisco, EMC, Papers, VDI, VMware

In the last two years pretty much every major vendor in the IT industry rushed to develop a rich VDI portfolio and roadmap. Each of them did its best to acquire promising startups, to announce new and highly efficient remote desktop protocols, to sign partnerships with OEMs for the next generation thin client.

From VMware to Citrix, from Sun to Quest, from HP to Verizon.
Even TV vendors like LG want to be part of the VDI game.
Everyone but Microsoft.

So far Microsoft preferred to stay under the radar as much as possible, even when they acquired Calista Technologies in January 2008, a small startup able to offload the remote client from the task of rendering any sort of multimedia resource; even when they announced some basic desktop brokering capabilities in the imminent Windows Server 2008 R2.

Now some concrete details are finally emerging and the Microsoft VDI strategy seems more interesting than expected:

…In the RTM version of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, GDI applications, media with Windows Media Player, and Aero Glass will continue using the client-side rendering for remote scenarios as demonstrated in the pre-release version. For the RTM release, client-based rendering will no longer be available for DirectX 10.1 / DXGI 1.1 and Direct 2D applications, instead this type of content will be remoted using host-side resources leveraging the enhanced bitmap acceleration capabilities in R2. This decision was made based on the feedback we received during the engineering and validation process, where the number one requirement was quality and robustness.  While this design change may impact the utilization of CPU and GPU resources on the host side for certain use cases, it provides a consistent approach to remoting multiple types of rich (2D and 3D) content across a broad range of rich and thin client devices.

…

As for running DirectX applications on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V virtual machines, there will be the GPU offload hardware assist Calista technologies at some point in the future…

So basically Microsoft doesn’t just plan to integrate Calista technologies in RDP as already announced, but it also plans to elaborate on the virtualization host those multimedia contents executed inside the VDI virtual desktops (Brian Madden has additional insights about this).

The key point is that Microsoft knows a lot about the roadmap of the upcoming GPUs that many customers may be ignoring at the moment.
Those next generation display cards will be just another piece, along with a new remote desktop and a client hypervisor, of the very complex infrastructure that will have to build in the future to make VDI a really efficient solution.

Labels: Microsoft, VDI

The VDI division of Quest, Provision Networks, is preparing to release the next version of its vWorkspace (formerly Virtual Access Suite or VAS) connection broker.

The beta 1 of vWorkspace 6.2 is mainly a bugfix release but it also enhances the support for multiple monitor configurations, for USB redirection and for the graphic acceleration (which now supports CPU throttling on the client).

Side by side with this beta Quest/Provision Networks also launched a second, more interesting beta program, unveiling its first client for Apple Mac OS X: Mac AppPortal.

In this first beta the only features that have been implemented are:

• creating and editing connections, saving them to and loading from a persistent storage (disk database)
• retrieving application lists from the broker
• launching applications in RDP session
• sharing RDP sessions for new application when there's a session that is already running

To enroll for the beta programs above you have to create an account for the Provision Networks download facility.

Labels: Provision Networks, Quest, VDI

In January 2008 ClearCube decided to spin off its software division under the name of VDIworks to sell in an easier way its agnostic connection broker.

Since that time, VDIworks has been off the radar and yet it has made interesting moves: it released a VDI plug-in that works with System Center Operation Manager (SCOM) rather than System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) and announced a plan to offer an offline VDI solution based on VMware Player.

In September 2008 the company even extended its support to the HP RGS protocol, but now it seems like there’s a completely different strategy as VDIworks announces its own desktop protocol: VideoOverIP (VoIP, easily confused with Voice Over IP).

With this new protocol VDIworks enters a dangerous and crowded space that it believes will dominate easily, at least looking at the comparison below:

For now the protocol is supported on VMware ESX and Server VMs, on Microsoft Hyper-V VMs and on Windows XPe clients.

The interesting thing about VideoOverIP is that it can be used without a connection broker inside small environments. VDIworks offers it as a free download here.

Labels: VDI, VDIworks

At the end of April virtualization.info broke the news about the HP plan to stop the development of its high-performance remote desktop protocol, RGS, and its connection broker, SAM, to leave the VDI market as a software player.

The information we published is based on an internal, official and very updated HP presentation that we received from trusted sources.
Despite that, both HP and several anonymous claimed our article as false and misleading.

Because we don’t want to damage our sources, we didn’t (and will not in the future) publish that presentation. We believe that the credibility we built over the years will be enough for most of our readers.

Nonetheless, because we have no interest in discredit HP, we were happy to reach the company by phone yesterday to understand their official version of the story.

The first point is that HP fully acknowledges the existence of the internal presentation we saw and declares it a “draft strategy” that was being “tested” across the company and a few customers.
It doesn’t matter if the information contained inside it tells the opposite of what will follow, the HP leadership told virtualization.info that the presentation was far away from describing the finalized strategy.
Of course the DRAFT label didn’t appear anywhere inside the slide deck and our sources reported it as the new go-to-market strategy, otherwise virtualization.info would never publish the article in the way it went out.

The second point is that the HP finalized strategy is to continue to develop and support RGS and SAM for the future.
The company will continue to offer both its remote desktop protocol and its connection broker, side by side with the Citrix, Microsoft and VMware alternatives.
In the future HP will increase the R&D investments with these three vendors to integrate their protocols (Citrix HDX, Microsoft RDP + Calista enhancements, VMware PCoIP) with RGS and the RDP enhancements that it’s already offering through the OEM partnership with Quest/Provision Networks.
At the same time HP will work to integrate SAM with the next generation VDI technologies, like the client hypervisors that will come from vendors like Citrix and VMware, or the virtualized GPUs that will arrive from chipset vendors in the near future.

In the last few weeks HP briefed the industry analysts on this strategy and reassured virtualization.info on the destiny of RGS and SAM, so whatever has happened before the company is now fully committed to keep going its VDI software technologies.

Labels: HP, VDI

Last week VMware updated to version 3.1 (build 167577) its connection broker solution View (formerly Virtual Desktop Manager).

This version includes the following new features:

• Support for HP RGS protocol (version 5.2.5)
  but only when the VDI endpoints are HP hardware (blade PCs, Workstations and Blade Workstations
• Multimedia Redirection (MMR) for Windows Vista
  MMR technology delivers the multimedia stream directly to the client using an RDP virtual channel instead of decoding and rendering it with RDP. This enables full fidelity playback in View Client
• Client Information
  Information about the client device that the end user is connecting from is now provided for the desktop session as registry settings. This enables customers to use third party tools or create custom scripts to map local printers to devices. The information available includes the device name, IP address, and MAC address.
• Automated Backup
  You can now configure automated backup of LDAP data and View Composer databases in View Administrator, enabling disaster recovery.
• Adobe Flash Bandwidth Reduction
  The Adobe Flash bandwidth reduction feature improves end-user productivity when browsing Adobe Flash content

Labels: VDI, VMware

David Bieneman, the man that founded Vizioncore, sold it to Quest in January 2008, and left just two months after the acquisition, is back.

Of course the strict agreements that regulate an acquisition prevent him from starting or working for a company that compete with Quest/Vizioncore.
So Bieneman is now moving in a new virtualization segment space with a startup called Liquidware Labs.

With him there is J. Tyler Rohrer, the former founder of Foedus, a successful consulting company that was acquired by VMware in January 2008.
Roher left VMware after working for almost one year and a half in the Enterprise Desktop team (the one responsible for VMware View).

The company tagline, The Art & Science of the Desktop, and the Roher profile on LinkedIn unveil that Liquidware Labs will be active in the VDI space, will address the PSO organizations, and that will leverage the technology of vmSight, recently acquired while in stealth mode for an undisclosed sum.

vmSight is a startup that offers a solution to track how the users work on the virtual desktops, through the analysis of their network activity.
Think about it as a network sniffer that re-assembles the snooped packets to understand the history and the performance of a VDI session and make it easier to troubleshoot.

What Liquidware Labs will do with this technology which is covered by 13 patents?
Roher is very clear on the market strategy:

Going to assist the market with purpose built tools to enable the adoption, consumption, and scalability of VDI projects.
I believe before we build it, we need to design it, and before we design it, we need to assess what "it" needs to be.
PSO Focus and Application First methodology

While waiting for the official launch of Liquidware Labs, we can bet on the chance of turn this new company in another successful acquisition.

Thanks for Lanamark (which will actually compete with Liquidware Labs) for making this story public.

Liquidware Labs has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.

Labels: Acquisitions, LiquidWare Labs, VDI, vmSight

After trying for years to impose its high-performance remote desktop, Remote Graphics Software (RGS), the company has finally given up and will phase it out by the end of this year.

virtualization.info has learned from very trusted sources that HP will not only drop RGS but it will also exit the VDI market completely, stopping the development of its connection broker Session Allocation Manager (SAM).

Starting 2010 the company will rely on third party offerings provided by Citrix, VMware and Microsoft. HP is especially looking at two protocols: the Citrix Prism/HDX and the software implementation of the PCoIP protocol that VMware and Teradici are developing.
Same story for the connection broker: HP is working to adopt Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View.
Of course HP will continue to develop thin clients/blade workstations for SBC/VDI environments where it has a serious profit.

The HP moves in the VDI market started to seem strange already in December 2008 when the company closed a major OEM deal with Quest/Provision Networks.
It will be interesting to see what Quest has to say about this radical change in the strategy.

The company is already informing its customers about the decision as confirmed by an anonymous comment we just received on another article:

I have heard that HP is cancelling the RGS product. Does anyone else have information about this? My information comes from a colleague who is the IT director at a company which is a large HP customer. They have been using RGS and are now politely being asked to look elsewhere.

Update: The HP public relations department promptly contacted virtualization.info to provide a completely different perspective. We are happy to republish it to demonstrate that there is no interest at all in discredit HP:

As a leader in thin client solutions and virtualization, HP is committed to the development of VDI technologies, as well as continued innovation in the client virtualization market.  We are also continuing ongoing development of HP RGS and SAM into 2009 and beyond, in addition to extending our long-standing relationships with industry partners with expanded support for their protocols and brokers. This broad support strategy will ensure that the HP client virtualization portfolio delivers the broadest customer choice as this market continues to mature. In addition, we offer a number of VDI infrastructure and solution services that enable customers to build a reliable desktop infrastructure that reduces total cost of ownership, increases security, simplifies technology management and readily adapts to new business requirements with improved flexibility. 

In its emails HP is suggesting that our article above is disseminating false information.
Unfortunately the official HP document that virtualization.info reviewed and the feedbacks received by several unconnected sources tell a completely different story. And we have the evidence to prove it.

If HP changed its strategy again and decided to continue the development of RGS and SAM for the years to come, we are happy about that.
Or, if the official HP document that we reviewed contained completely wrong information, then virtualization.info will promptly write a new post to clarify the whole thing, as soon as HP will provide an official explanation about the discrepancy.
Of course HP is also very welcome to comment directly on this post so that our audience will have the opportunity to read all the perspectives.

Meanwhile if any reader has further evidence of the story is welcome to write a comment like the anonymous that we quoted inside this article.

Labels: HP, VDI

One week ago virtualization.info broke the news about the departure of Karthik Rau, Vice President of Product Management and Worldwide Marketing, and a key member of the original leadership team that led VMware in the early days.

An anonymous source sent us a tip on that news suggesting to double-check the employment status of some key members of the View (formerly Virtual Desktop Manager or VDM) team, arrived at VMware after the 2007 acquisition of Propero.

Two of them left the company to start a consulting firm:

• Steve Peskin - Senior Director of VDI OEM Alliances
• Tommy Armstrong - Senior Product Marketing Manager for VDM/View and ThinApp

A third member of the original Propero team left VMware immediately after the acquisition and now joined again his former colleagues: Steve Roberts, Business Development at Propero.

One of their profiles is specially interesting as it reveals the price that VMware paid in 2007 to have Propero: $25 million.
At that time the terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Labels: Leadership, VDI, VMware

While everybody waits to know if IBM will swallow Sun, Sun continues to execute its (controversial) virtualization strategy.
The third version of its VDI connection broker, simply called VDI, is finally ready.

Announced in January, as expected the product introduces support for xVM VirtualBox, the hosted VMM that Sun acquired from innotek in February 2008.

As previously highlighted, it’s unclear why Sun believes that its customers may want to run a resource hog like a virtual desktop infrastructure on top of a platform that is much slower than a hypervisor.
The reason can’t be the price: even if VirtualBox is free there are several free hypevisors available at this point.

Anyway there are other features that are more interesting:

• the support for Microsoft RDP remoting protocol (finally!)
• the support for Microsoft Active Directory
• the integration with Solaris ZFS

Sun is pricing this version at $40 per concurrent user / year.

Labels: Releases, Sun, VDI

It’s nice to see that Leostream is finally taking a new direction. Their flagship product is still seriously in need of a major upgrade after one year and a half of hibernation but at least the company is closing new valuable partnerships every two months or so:

• a reseller agreement with IBM in September 2008
• a technology partnership with eG Innovations in October 2008
• an OEM deal with BOSaNOVA in February 2009

and now another technology partnership with NoMachine, to support their NX remote protocol on Connection Broker. 

Leostream may have multiple reasons to support a remote protocol for Linux environments such NX.
First of all the company wants to extend the range of supported infrastructures as much as possible, trying to emulate the success of Provision Networks (acquired by Quest in November 2007).
Secondarily, it wants to find a niche where there are less competitors, and where VMware is not so intrusive.
Last but not least, maybe Leostream hopes that the new Red Hat strategy around KVM will boost the adoption of Linux-based VDI infrastructures and wants to be a frontrunner there.

Labels: Alliances, Leostream, NoMachine, VDI

It’s not a secret that VMware is working hard to drop Microsoft RDP as its remote desktop protocol of choice in VDI environments.

At the end of 2007 the company was already part of the VESA committee trying to develop the new standard Net2Display (that never saw the day of light so far).
And then, at VMworld 2008, the company announced a technology partnership with the startup Teradici to develop a software version of their PCoIP protocol (which only works with dedicated graphic cards).

Last week during the VMworld Europe 2009 (see virtualization.info live coverage of day 1 and day 2), VMware was expected to show an alpha build of that software implementation but instead presented the existing Teradici solution.

Brian Madden and provided a good description of its upcoming features:

• 150-250ms latency in WAN scenarios with support for lightweight Flash applications, VoIP, remote printing, etc.
• multiple displays with 1900x1200 pixels resolution in LAN scenarios, with support for full Flash applications, Adobe AIR, Microsoft Silverlight, HD video
• additional support for 3D CAD, rendering and animations, when dedicated graphic cards are available

Chris Wolf instead saw the software version of PCoIP and reports:

…

With the default install, PCoIP delivered smooth rendering of flash, streaming video, PDF viewing, PowerPoint editing and presentation viewing, and editing a heavily commented Word document. Warren stated that the goal for the software PCoIP implementation is to maintain quality and user experience at connections with bandwidth as low as 125 Kbps and latency as high as 250 ms. In our test, Warren used a WANem virtual appliance to simulate low bandwidth and high latency. Warren ratcheted up the latency to 250 ms. No problem. I then asked if he would bump down the bandwidth to under 200 Kbps. He took bandwidth down to 150 Kbps and performance remained strong…

Labels: VDI, VMware

In October 2007 Citrix closed a major agreement with HP to resell XenServer Enterprise Edition on ProLiant and BladeSystem servers.

In March 2008 the two companies took a step further, launching a special version of Citrix hypervisor called XenServer HP Select Edition which comes pre-installed in selected servers and offers a free management console called ProLiant Virtual Console (PVC). 

In May 2008, when Citrix launched its new end-to-end VDI solution XenDesktop, HP was there once again confirming support for the product on ProLiant and Compaq thin clients.

The love story continues today with HP announcing that its Blade PC systems will be sold with the just released Citrix XenDesktop 3.

At the moment there are no details about the configurations, pricing or availability. It’s likely that HP will unveil the product at the upcoming Synergy 2009.

It’s interesting to note how many different VDI games HP is trying to play at the same time.

Besides partnering with Citrix, the company is about to use the technology provided by Desktone (which is funded by Citrix) to become a hosted VDI provider.
At the same time it’s refreshing its current VDI offering by updating its own remote desktop protocol RGS and OEM’ing the Provision Networks Desktop Optimization Pack.

Labels: Alliances, Citrix, HP, VDI

The first forecast of the year comes from Gartner, which predicted an increase by 43% of virtualization software revenue during this year, moving from $1.9 billion scored in 2008 to $2.7 billion.

In particular the analysis firm expects that revenue from VDI solutions will more than triple from $74.1 million to $298.6 million in 2009 while revenue from server virtualization management software will increase 42% from $913.9 million in 2008 to $1.3 billion in 2009.
Last but not least, the revenue from server virtualization infrastructure will grow 22.5% from $917 million in 2008 to $1.1 billion in 2009.

Gartner is also saying that VDI solutions already represent 11% of the current virtualization software revenue market.

Even more interesting than that, Garner predicts that Microsoft will challenge the VMware leadership by 2013.

This last one sounds like the most pessimist estimate about Microsoft released so far: in 2007 Forrester predicted that the Redmond giant wouldn’t impact the virtualization market until 2010, while IDC, just two months ago, suggested that Microsoft would turn the hypervisor market upside down this year.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Predictions has been updated accordingly.

Labels: Market Trends, Microsoft, VDI, VMware

The US startup Desktone launched in April 2008 signing impressive partnerships with Verizon, with SoftBank Telecom, with HP and with IBM.

Then the company returned to silent mode until yesterday when it announced a new technology partnership with vmSight.

vmSight offers a performance monitor focused on applications response time in a virtual environment which may be particularly useful in a VDI environment.
DABCC.com published a detailed review of the product that is worth a read.

Desktone will offer the vmSight Center console to its hosted VDI (or Desktop as a Service, DaaS, as they like to call it) providers so to understand which customers are abusing the system and which ones are having a poor experience.

vmSight has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.

Labels: Alliances, Desktone, Performance Monitoring, VDI, vmSight

While VMware is busy releasing an open source client for its connection broker, Citrix is busy updating its end-to-end VDI platform.

The new XenDesktop 3.0, released just two months since version 2.1, introduces some important updates and new features:

• Includes XenServer 5.0 rather than 4.1 (which implies a higher consolidation ratio - Citrix claims that XenDesktop 3.0 can now host twice the number of virtual desktop of XenDesktop 2.x)
• Includes Provisioning Server (formerly Ardence Provisioning Server) as an integrated component rather than a bundled package
• Includes additional features from XenApp ICA (SpeedScreen multimedia redirection, USB devices support)
• Includes a brand new set of remote desktop rendering enhancements called HD-X
• Includes User Profile Manager 2.0
• Supports SmartCard authentication

The innovation around HD-X is the important part of the new XenDesktop.
The optimization engine des a lot of things, on server-side, over the network and on client-side:

On severs-side HD-X accelerates some graphic-intensive activities like photo edition, web browsing, video and (bi-directional) audio consumption, and more.
In H1 2009 the technology will also be able to accelerate VoIP software applications as well as 3D/CAD ones.

On network-side HD-X estimates the bandwidth availability (with a special attention to brahcn offices scenarios), prioritizes the virtual channels, balances the remote desktop session

On client-side HD-X accelerates some common UI interactions, like the text-entry or the mouse-click feedback, or multimedia consumption.
Additionally, HD-X extends support for client hardware, like multiple monitors, high-performance display cards or USB devices.
In H2 2009 HD-X will also be able to support the Microsoft Aero Glass interface (possibly both the one included in Windows Vista and the upcoming new version featured by Windows 7).

Anyway the most important enhancement that HD-X will introduce is expected in H2 2009 as well, when Citrix will introduce a technology called SmartRendering.
SmartRendering will basically inspect every component of the virtual desktop infrastructure, automatically tuning the XenDesktop features to deliver the best possible experience.
And this means that HD-X will autonomously decide where to put the rendering load (on the server, on the network or on the client) depending on resources availability.

Labels: Citrix, Releases, VDI

By now it should be more than clear that the battle for the enterprise market between VMware and Citrix is no more played on the server consolidation playground, but rather on the VDI one.

The are a lot of component in a virtual desktop infrastructure where the two companies (and their additional competitors) can innovate: the consolidation ratio provided by the server-side hypervisor, the connection broker intelligence, the speed of the remote desktop protocol, the provisioning of the thin client OS, and very soon the efficiency of the client-side hypervisor (needed to achieve the much wanted offline VDI).

A notable move in this long-term game was made by Citrix which just two weeks ago announced a groundbreaking agreement with Intel to develop a client hypervisor which will be distributed through all the major OEM partners.

VMware answers today releasing an open source VDI client: VMware View Open Client.

Available under the GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1 (LGPL v 2.1), this source code (binaries are available as well) can be integrated on any Linux distribution.
So far VMware tested it against SUSE  Linux Enterprise Thin Client (SLETC) and Debian 4.0r3.

The company hopes that playing the open source card, it can conquer a large number of thin client providers, which could prefer to adopt and customize View Open Client rather than developing their own connectors.
If so many new upcoming devices on the market may feature out-of-the-box connectivity to VMware Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM) and VMware View connection brokers.

It sounds like a good plan, assuming that the LGPL license and the VMware Contribution Agreement aren’t too restrictive for partners.
Nonetheless the mass-adoption may require some time as this first version of the product is missing some key enhanced features:

• USB redirection
• Multiple desktop sessions
• Multimedia redirection

Labels: VDI, VMware

Along with its Xen-based hypervisor, xVM Server, Sun is preparing to launch the third version of its connection broker: xVM VDI 3.0.
The Early Access program will be open within the end of this month.

The strange thing is that instead of supporting the upcoming bare-metal virtualization platform, Sun decides to introduce support for xVM Virtual Box, the hosted virtualization product for the consumer market that the company acquired from innotek in February 2008.

It’s unclear why a customer may want to use a hosted platform (which is definitively slower compared to a hypervisor) to run a resource-consuming VDI environment.
Hopefully Sun will share some performance comparisons to understand how many virtual desktops can fit inside a VirtualBox host.

Even stranger is the fact that Sun seems to be absolutely sure that xVM Server must be not supported.
The company is developing its hypervisor since a very long time: the virtualization engine was already in the work when Sun VDI reached version 2.0, ten months ago.
Considering the Sun had more than one year to integrate xVM Server 1.0 with xVM VDI 3.0 and didn’t.

The support for ESX instead is still there, as it’s now clear how Sun bets on VMware solutions much more than on its own.

Labels: Sun, VDI

After a long beta, the popular (at least in Europe) Login Consultants last week released the first version of their Virtual Session Indexer (VSI).

VSI 1.0 is a free benchmark platform to measure the remote desktop performance in a Terminal Server  farm or in a VDI environment.

To run the tool it's required to have a 4 tiers infrastructure: a domain controller for the authentication a file server for logging user sessions, a server to host the TS/XenApp/VDI service and a workstation to launch the user sessions.

Here a video of the product in action:

Download it here.

Labels: Tools, VDI

The VDI market gets more crowded every day. All the biggest players in the space are developing, releasing, or rearranging their solutions to offer an end-to-end VDI platform to make the client consolidation through virtualization a viable option.

This is a space where Citrix, VMware and Quest/Provision networks lead, followed by aggressive newcomers like Red Hat (which acquired Qumranet and plan to use KVM), Pano Logic (which has its own platform), Leostream, Ericom (which supports many hypervisors but seems to bet on Oracle VM), Propalms and more.

Each one is trying to working to offer some sort of performance booster for the RDP protocol (while we all wait for Microsoft to enhance it with the technology acquired by Calista), or to completely replace it.

HP has some technology to push in this space so yesterday with a notable marketing exercise it relaunched its offering under the name of Virtual Client Essentials.

The new platform includes the connection broker Session Allocation Manager (SAM), a brand new Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) Enhancements package, and its own remoting protocol called Remote Graphics Software (RGS).
The bundle doesn’t include a specific hypervisor as HP doesn’t own one but SAM supports both VMware and Citrix ones.

Update: virtualization.info just received multiple confirmations that the new HP RDP Enhancements package is a licensed version of the Quest/Provision Networks Desktop Optimization Pack launched in September.
The product can score up to 8x compression for RDP sessions and it’s remarkable that HP decided to use it despite the existence of its RGS protocol.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar has been updated accordingly.

Labels: HP, Provision Networks, VDI

Yesterday VMware released version 3.0 (build 127642) of its VDI connection broker, once known as Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM). The product is now named VMware View and offers three main new features.

First of all, the new release VMware moves deep into the Citrix and Quest/Provision Networks territory as View 3.0 is now able to coordinate end users access to Microsoft Terminal Server and generic Windows boxes with RDP enabled. VMware calls this Unified Access.

Much more than that the product experimentally introduces the much wanted offline VDI capability, allowing users to check out their virtual desktops and leave the corporate network with its image stored locally in their laptops.

Last but not least, VMware View introduces the capability to update a large-scale VDI through the use of the linked clone feature on a gold master virtual desktop.
Here the capability is called View Composer and VMware says it can cut up to 70% of the storage space (here’s a real-world example but what happens if the gold master image becomes corrupted?).

One major thing that this version of View is missing is the announced brand new remote desktop protocol that VMware is developing with the startup Teradici.
Nonetheless View 3 introduces some RDP enhancements thanks to the collaboration with the thin clients vendor Wyse Technologies.

Following Citrix and its XenDesktop in the attempt to bundle a complete application delivery platform, VMware offers View 3.0 in two editions.
The biggest one, Premiere, includes the hypervisor (ESX) and its management console (vCenter), the connection broker (View Manager), the application virtualization platform (ThinApp) and the desktop virtualization platform (Workstation).

But as Brian Madden says VMware View is still distant from Citrix XenDesktop as the former cannot seamless merge (yet) local and remote apps on the user’s desktop.Download a trial here.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap and the Virtualization Industry Radar have been updated accordingly.

Labels: Releases, VDI, VMware

The ClearCube spin-off VDIwork announced an upcoming extension of its connection broker that promises to introduce the much wanted offline VDI (sometimes dubbed mobile VDI) capability.

Expected for the end of this quarter, VDIwork2Go will allow the mobile workforce to check-out the hosted virtual desktop, run a local copy on the laptop of choice (through VMware Player) and leave the network.
Once the user checks-in again, the changes made inside the local VM will be synchronized back to the virtual desktop infrastructure.

The VDI approach is certainly something that many customers are evaluating these days but the implementation still implies some major challenges. This is one of them and many vendors are working to solve it so to boost the confidence in the solution.

VMware is working to offer offline VDI as well: the company previewed the technology for the first time at VMworld Europe 2008 in February, and then formally announced it as a feature of the upcoming VMware View.

Labels: VDI, VDIworks

By now even the stones know that most virtualization vendors are shifting their focus on a new scenario to pitch: from server consolidation to desktop consolidation (aka hosted desktop environment aka virtual desktop infrastructure aka VDI).
Consolidated player and just born startups are all competing for a slice of the VDI market which is supposed to be rich and with endless potentials.

So far Microsoft carefully avoided to join the party evaluating the market too immature to massively invest in.
As part of a consolidated strategy the company preferred to leave the early opportunity for some brave partners, in this case Citrix, Quest/Provision Networks and Ericom.

Now something has changed as Microsoft has just announced the intention to offer a VDI connection broker as part of its Terminal Services product.

The new version of TS, renamed Remote Desktop Services (RDS), will appear in Windows Server 2008 R2, expected in 2010, and will feature a brand new new Remote Desktop Connection Broker.

Anyway Microsoft immediately clarifies that VDI partners are still more than welcome as:

…they will find an extensive set of APIs that will allow them to continue innovation and deliver added value to customers.

In this way Microsoft continues to overlap the Citrix offering in the virtualization space.
Of course the latter will be able to bring innovation on top of the RDS and its new connection broker like it did for years on top of Terminal Services, but the existence of XenDesktop in such scenario may become an expensive portfolio option.

It will be interesting to see how Citrix will position its offering, specifically XenServer and XenDesktop, by 2010.

Labels: Microsoft, VDI

Propalms, a US-based firm focused on the thin client market, is interested in virtualization, specifically VDI, since a long time: in April 2007 it joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner program and in January 2008 it announced that the newest version of its flagship product, TSE 6.0, would include a connection broker.

The product entered in beta phase in June and, without many details, Propalms announced a no better clarified compatibility with VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V and Virtual Server.

Now TSE 6.0 is finally out but, with much surprise, the VDI connection broker can only work with VMware Server.
Something serious has happened: after all the announcements made Propalms doesn’t spend a single word about the new VDI capabilities on its official press release, and even the website barely mentions it.

Labels: Propalms, Releases, VDI

Not surprisingly at all the analysis firm Gartner just released a new report forecasting that virtualization will be the top strategic technology for 2009. But more interesting than that is the firm prediction on VDI adoption:

…However, despite ambitious deployment plans from many organizations, deployments of hosted virtual desktop capabilities will be adopted by fewer than 40 percent of target users by 2010.

The second most strategic technology for 2009, believe or not, is cloud computing.
We’ll see if Gartner prediction is more accurate than virtualization architects perceptions collected so far at virtualization.info.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Predictions has been updated accordingly.

Labels: Market Trends, VDI

At this point it’s well known that Sun is about to enter the virtualization market with a massive offering: a hypervisor based on Xen (xVM Server), a management platform for physical and virtual machines (xVM Ops Center), a connection broker (Sun VDI) and even a hosted virtualization platform for desktops (VirtualBox).
On top of that it’s easy to guess that the company will release virtualization friendly servers and storage arrays.

As said many times before, Sun has a unique opportunity at the moment, being the only big company that can offer a complete computing stack for virtualization, from the hardware to the software, without bothering its customers with multi-vendor license and support agreements (and issues).

In such position one would think that Sun is focusing all its effort in integrating the components above in a well concerted offering, leaving few things to desire outside the company’s portfolio. But it’s not the case.

No matter if its hypervisor is due next month or so, no matter if there’s already a connection broker that could interconnect with it, Sun continues to enforce its relationship with VMware.

Last month the two announced that VMware Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM) will be sold by Sun with its Sun Ray thin clients.

It’s not hard to figure out where the Sun customers will look at when in need of new hypervisor, and it’s hard to believe that the company will be able to redirect their attention to xVM Server as soon as it’s out.

What surprises the most is that Sun continues to do business with VMware despite the hypervisor interoperability alliance with Microsoft.
Of course the latter doesn’t imply any kind of exclusive loyalty to the Redmond giant, but in practice behind such agreements there are remarkable financial interests, and Microsoft is probably not too happy to know that Sun is encouraging the adoption of ESX rather than Hyper-V.

We’ll see after the xVM family will be out if and how this strategy will be modified and what impact it caused so far.

Labels: Alliances, Sun, VDI, VMware

At its conference VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas last month, VMware previewed the next phase of its virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technologies announcing it as VMware View.

On stage Steve Herrod, the company’s CTO, unveiled a partnership with the startup Teradici to develop a more efficient remote desktop protocol.
It seems that this may be not enough, maybe because of the time needed to have a commercial product, so VMware took some extra steps to boost Microsoft RDP performance today.

The company signed a license agreement with the thin computing vendor Wyse Technologies to use its technologies TCX-MMR (for multimedia) and TCX-MDS (for multi-display) to enhance the virtual desktop experience in VMware View products.

Labels: Alliances, VDI, VMware, Wyse Technologies